Hi Doug On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 11:07 -0400, Douglas Pollard wrote: > HI All, I am a retired machinist and I have a little experience > running and programing CNC. I have a drill press that with a X, Y axis > milling vice on it. I do a little milling on little home shop > projects. I have morris taper endmill attachments and it don't do to > bad . I would like to run the x,y axises with a program like Emc. I > have a couple of stepping motors Nema 17 I think. Came out of old dot > matrix printer. I thought maybe they would pull the little table for > milling maybe geared down with a timing belt drive. If it would feed 10 > inches a min I would be happy.
Years ago I modified a Griz minimill to ballscrews and little old style NEMA 23 MEA motors that were rated about 100 ounce inch. I used 4/1 belts and 5tpi screws and it was just about unstoppable at 15-20 ipm. If you got that belt and ballscrew ratio even higher it might work with NEMA 17. You will want to watch the RPM of the motors because torque on steppers drops off really quickly. > I have and old computer 155 MHZ I > thought maybe to install xubuntu and Emc if the machine is fast enough > . This box would really stretch the low end for CPU. Part of the problem with steppers is that the base thread speed you use is what determines the steps per second you can get from it and base thread will be slow with a 155. Another part of the problem is getting enough memory into these old boxes to satisfy the Ubuntu install stuff. I've done that successfully with 196 and once with <100 on a laptop but it was a day long process. I was able to run BDI-4xx on an overclocked Gateway 166. I got just enough out of it to run the Griz mentioned above at 8-10 IPM. I believe that finding something a bit faster at auction or used or picked up along the street during junk day would give a better chance of satisfaction. > I have some experience with Linux programs but but probably barely > past the newby stage. I think it would be fun to play with and I don't > expect much out of this but some good learning and experience. Maybe > cut some aluminumor plastic parts. Does this sound feasable? Sure. You don't need great rapids to handle these materials but you do need to be careful to get a decent chip load and cooling or you'll have trouble with melting and breaking stuff. > I guess > I need to know how steep is the learning curve to get Emc hooked up > through steppers and motors to run such a thing. I don't really want to > have to get a degree in something to do this. The essential configuration is done for you in any one of several defaults. You might have to stretch out base period on a slow box and reduce velocity stuff to get round real-time error messages. A bit of time on IRC while setting it up after install ought to get you going. > I could buy all this but > that wouldn't be much fun. If making chips is your goal, buy it. If the construction/retrofit process as well as chips is your goal, EMC2 is the right place to be. I've serviced CNC stuff since about 79 and always thought to myself, damn, this could be done with a PC. Since I found the EMC project in about 95 I've been able to play to my heart's content. Rayh ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
